Losing Visceral Fat Cuts Diabetes Risk By 28% (Even If You Regain The Weight!)

We have previously written about Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It, and while we’re a lot less enthusiastic than many about weight loss in general as a panacea (it’s usually not), it is unequivocally true that visceral belly fat specifically has important health impacts, and for most people most of the time, having less of it is better than having more.

Today, we’ll talk about its impacts on diabetes.

Now, one of the main troubles many people find with weight loss in general is weight regain. In this case, that’s not such an issue, because of…

Long-lasting metabolic benefits

In this case, the research shows that it can last even if the weight loss doesn’t.

Specifically, people regained all of their lost body weight on average, but certain health benefits persisted, showing how weight regain doesn’t necessarily erase all of the metabolic gains from a period of having lost visceral belly fat.

And the visceral fat truly is what matters the most in this regard, since visceral fat was the only fat depot whose reduction consistently predicted a lower future risk of type 2 diabetes, over the course of following 366 participants from two 18-month diet and exercise trials for up to 10 years.

In numbers: every 5% reduction in visceral fat during the original intervention was associated with a 17% lower future diabetes risk, a 10% reduction with a 28–30% lower risk, a 15% reduction with a 40% lower risk, and a 20% reduction with a 50% lower risk.

Further, there was a “metabolic legacy” effect: each 10% reduction in visceral fat was independently associated with a 28% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes during long-term follow-up, even after accounting for later weight changes, diet quality, physical activity, and other clinical factors.

Despite full weight regain, waist circumference and abdominal fat depots remained below baseline levels; liver fat returned to baseline, while pancreatic fat rose above baseline levels.

You can read the paper in full, here: Lifestyle-Induced Visceral Fat Loss as a Key Target for Durable Cardiometabolic Health: MRI-Assessed 5- and 10-Year Follow-Up After 2 Clinical Trials

What to do about it

Firstly, do see our previously-mentioned article: Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It for the dos and don’ts of getting healthier visceral fat levels (which for most people means: lower) .

Next up, see also: Body Fat & Pelvic Floor Problems: What Matters Most Is Where The Fat Is for the science behind “apple or pear” distributions, and how to switch it up.

You may also be wondering: Can We Do Fat Redistribution? And the answer is yes, and we are doing it all the time whether we want to or not, so we might as well know what things affect our fat distribution in various body parts. The article we just linked there shows how.

While we’re at it, one other place you really don’t want excess fat, for metabolic reasons, is your liver. So: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

Want to learn more?

You might like this book that we reviewed a while ago:

Why We Get Sick – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman ← this is about insulin resistance, and, importantly, the invisible insulin resistance that precedes blood sugar imbalances by many years (it goes unnoticed because the pancreas will dutifully keep cranking out more and more insulin to keep the blood sugars stable, until one day it just can’t keep up anymore, and then and only then does prediabetes get diagnosed).

Enjoy!